Difficulties in obtaining the needed drugs for lethal injection has forced several states, including Ohio, to delay executions.
Ohio
announced Tuesday that it is delaying all scheduled executions until 2017 and beyond because of problems obtaining the drugs necessary to carry out lethal injections. A release from the state's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) stated:
"DRC continues to seek all legal means to obtain the drugs necessary to carry out court ordered executions, but over the past few years it has become exceedingly difficult to secure those drugs because of severe supply and distribution restrictions," the release read. "The new dates are designed to provide DRC additional time necessary to secure the required execution drugs."
Eleven death row inmates which Ohio had scheduled to kill next year and one in early 2017 have been re-scheduled for later executions. Thirteen other inmates were also slated to die under the new schedule. Executions of all of them are now slated to run from January 12, 2017—when Ronald Phillips is to killed for the rape and killing of his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter—until August 2019. Ohio officials hope to
acquire the needed drugs in the next 15 months:
Ohio has unsuccessfully tried to restock the drugs after using them up on executions, but has failed so far at importing chemicals from overseas. It's just one of several states scrambling to obtain drugs since pharmaceutical companies—mostly from Europe—began blocking the use of their products for executions.
In January 2014, Ohio became the first state to use an ad-hoc combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone to execute Dennis McGuire for the 1993 rape and murder of a pregnant woman. His execution took at least 25 minutes—a state record—and witnesses said he gasped and seized for a quarter of an hour.
The drugs it hopes to import or obtain from small drug companies known as compounding pharmacies are sodium thiopental and pentobarbital. Fourteen of the 31 states that impose the death penalty use pentobarbital in executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a group opposed to capital punishment. The drug is also used in assisted suicides in Europe and to euthanize animals. Ohio had obtained an import license from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, but the Food and Drug Administration warned officials there that imports of drugs for lethal injection purposes must have explicit FDA approval.
Other states—Arkansas, Oklahoma and Montana—have recently delayed executions over the drug issue, although the specific issues vary. Virginia executed an inmate October 1, but it had to obtain pentobarbital from the Texas prison system. That state, which executes more people than any other, has managed to obtain supplies of the drug from compounding pharmacies. But it has not disclosed the specific companies involved.
Numerous suggestions for overcoming the drug supply problem have been suggested by officials and citizens alike. Among them is returning to older, cruder methods that lethal injection was designed to supplant, including firing squads, and the use of a painless morphine overdose. But morphine requires a doctor's prescription and ethical guidelines urge against physicians participating in lethal injections. But such guidelines are not legally enforceable and some physicians are willing to participate in executions.
There is, however, a far better solution, one being slowly adopted by state after state: Abolishing capital punishment completely.